The MMS is a further development of the Short Message Service (SMS) and the Enhanced Message Service (EMS) and provides a complete end-to-end solution for personal multimedia mobile communication services. The MMS enables both information transmission between mobile terminals and the diversity of contents including various combinations of picture, voice, image, data and text. As an open media access platform, the MMS can derive abundant content service applications from interactions between mobile users and Internet content providers. Emergence of the MMS and relevant applications provides operators with a new service increase point while consolidating and further expanding the achievements of operators already gained in message services, so that the operators can strengthen their core competitiveness and are preponderant in severe competition for the telecommunication operation service market.
FIG. 1 illustrates a diagram of a structure of an existing multimedia messaging service system and the connection relationship with the outside world. Referring to FIG. 1, the system includes a relay and a server.
Particularly, the relay is adapted to receive a multimedia message sent from a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) gateway, a mail server and a Service Provider (SP) server and to perform MM2 encoding of the multimedia message and then transmit it to the server for processing; to receive a message sent from the server and to perform MM1 encoding of a message intended for the WAP gateway and then transmit it to the gateway; to perform MM3 encoding of a message intended for the mail server and then transmit it to the mail server; and to perform MM7 encoding of a message intended for the SP and then transmit it to the mail server.
The server is adapted to receive a multimedia message sent from the relay for storing and processing. The server can interoperate with an application server of an external network via a standard interface and provide a mobile terminal with abundant types of services.
The relay and the server constitute a Multimedia Messaging Service Center (MMSC) node which performs protocols translation, content adaptation, storage and scheduling of a multimedia message and accomplishes an operation of transporting the multimedia message between different multimedia devices.
In summary for above, only one MMSC node which processes all multimedia messages in the present network is present in the existing multimedia messaging service system. With an increasing of users of the multimedia messaging service, one node cannot process all multimedia messages in a timely way due to a limited processing power of the single node, which may result in a service interruption and an influence upon the use by the users.
For the problem of the limited processing power of the multimedia messaging service in the conventional art, there are primarily two capacity extension methods adopted currently.
One method is a dual-host scheme for a vertical capacity extension by means of extending a Central Processing Unit (CPU)/memory, but the processing power of a dual-host multimedia messaging service in this scheme may be at most a double of that of a single-host one. Further, the CPU/memory in a computer cannot be extended infinitely, and consequently the processing power of its multimedia messaging service may still be limited.
The other method is a capacity extension by segments. This method comprises a plurality of MMSC nodes, such as two MMSC nodes. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of a structure of a multimedia messaging service system using a capacity extension by segments. Referring to FIG. 2, the system divides mobile phone numbers with the beginning of 139102 into two number segments, in that 1391020˜139104 is the first one whose service is processed by a server 1 and 1391025˜139109 is the second one whose service is processed by a server 2. A sender sends a multimedia message to a load balancer. The load balancer determines a relay to receive the multimedia messaging service request according to its load balancing algorithm. The relay relays the multimedia messaging service request to a corresponding server according to a mobile phone number of the sender in a way that the service of the first number segment is processed by the server 1 and the service of the second number segment is processed by the server 2. The server stores the received multimedia message in a multimedia message storage module, reads the multimedia message from the multimedia message storage module upon determination of that a corresponding receiver can receive the multimedia message, and relays it to a relay which is determined according to loads of the relays, and the relay relays the multimedia message to the receiver. This method still has the following problems of limiting the processing power of the multimedia messaging system despite of an increased capacity thereof.
Firstly, since the relays and the servers are separate modules, messages have to be relayed over the network, and the number of cross accesses between hosts is too large, which may result in the problem of a low speed of processing multimedia messages and limit the processing power of the multimedia messaging service system.
Secondly, all of the servers store received multimedia messages centrally into the multimedia message storage module. In the case of a large multimedia message service, an Input/Output (I/O) performance bottleneck of the multimedia message storage module may limit the speed of reading and writing of the multimedia messages, thereby limiting the processing power of the multimedia messaging service system. A demand of operators cannot be satisfied in the case of a large service.
Thirdly, the relays and the servers are separate modules and a situation may occur in which the relays and the servers have different loads due to a limitation of a service type variation, an interface, etc. For example, a relay is fully loaded and a server is far from a full load, which may result in a waste of resources.
Fourthly, this method cannot ensure that the two number segments have exactly uniform service, and the service is interrupted if one of the two servers fails due to an overload, which may affect the user experience.